turtledovefandomcom-20200216-history
Talk:Sword Buddhism
This is really gratuisous. Pull a new strand of a major religion, one not connected to the PoD, out of your ass and declare it to have displaced the real strands of that religion. Reminds me of Henri--hmm, that might be the beginnings of IFiMT. Give it an unsubtle name like "Sword Buddha" and bam, you've got a nation of violent fanatics to serve the plot. But those whose violent fanaticism is religiously inspired call themselves purists and insist that it's their opponenents who are the apostates. If some, say, Theravadan wanted Buddhism to be violent he'd insist that the nonviolent Theravadans were corrupting influences and that all good Theravadans needed to follow only him. :The connection to the POD is that Islam did not come into being nor apparently Christianity. The Sword Buddhists seem to have displaced the Persians but OTL strands continued unchanged in Sout and East Asia. ML4E 20:08, April 7, 2010 (UTC) ::So in the absence of Islam, the Persians were converted to Buddhism, you're saying? And they put their own militant stamp on it, perhaps mixing it with elements Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism and whatever else they were familiar with, and pushed it farther west? Well . . . all right, I guess. Turtle Fan 20:31, April 7, 2010 (UTC) :::No, the story talks of the "Turks of Babylon" being the proponents of Sword Buddhism which they brought with them from the steppes of Asia. I take that to mean that they conquered the Persians and imposed their own society and religion on the land. ML4E 22:29, April 7, 2010 (UTC) ::::Then maybe exposure to Persian religion led them to turn regular Buddhism into Sword Buddhism? I harp on this because the main POD isn't quite unclear enough so I'd like to be even more mystified. Turtle Fan 01:41, April 8, 2010 (UTC) ::And I assume we never find out what happened to Judaism, by the way? Turtle Fan 20:31, April 7, 2010 (UTC) :::Correct as far as that goes. However, the people of Moab are described as Semites and polytheists. My recollection of the Bible is that they are descendants of relatives of Jacob who did not accompany Joesph to Egypt and reverted to the religion of their forefathers and remained so with the return of the Israelites under Moses and Aaron. That would make the remark true in OTL too but my inclination is to take it as a suggestion as to what happened to the Jews. ML4E 22:29, April 7, 2010 (UTC) ::::I'm pretty sure all of Jacob's children were accounted for in Egypt. Abraham had a bunch of sons after Sarah died. I remember reading that he kept sending them money and telling them to go farther and farther away so Isaac would have more elbow room. After that I don't remember; they might easily have settled Moab. Turtle Fan 01:41, April 8, 2010 (UTC) :::::Right but I am saying that I think their ancestors were kin of Jacob, e.g. brothers or cousins or such and not sons of. ML4E 01:54, April 8, 2010 (UTC) ::::::Sorry, I misread your last post. I thought you said "descendants of Jacob" instead of "descendants of relatives of Jacob." ::::::Something which has always intrigued me about Genesis is that Abraham and Isaac don't seem to have all that much interest in passing on their faith to their other sons. Abraham had Ishmael circumcised when the angel announced circumcision as the sign of the new covenant, but at that point Ishmael was his heir. Once Isaac was born he sort of cast Ishmael aside; God followed him and Hagar for a time, but soon enough we stop hearing about them and next thing you know centuries have gone by and the Ishmaelites are pagans. The souls of the sons who became the Moabites were even less of a priority for Abraham. As for Isaac, he always intended for Esau to be the one to carry the birthright he'd inherited from Abraham, but I recall no instances of him attending to Esau's religious education. Nor to Jacob's, really; God Himself had to take care of that when He appeared to Jacob in a vision. Turtle Fan 02:25, April 8, 2010 (UTC) But even that's gratuitous. Buddhists are no less capable of being violent people than anyone else, and those who are typically simply reconcile it with whatever school of Buddhism they practice without any demands for reform or purification or schism or what have you. Same as most of the rest of us. Turtle Fan 05:15, April 6, 2010 (UTC) ::I do agree it does seem to come out of thin air. When I read fiction, I tend to go with the flow and not view things like this critically. :::Sounds like a minor enough plot point. It's more on a par with my annoyance with things like Buzz Arlett and maybe whatever that stupid anagram he made up for Waldheim was, approaching but not reaching my annoyance with the most glaring examples of parallelism in TL-191. You can take out an element of history without replacing it with something similar. Sometimes I feel like HT's idea of history is like Samuel Francis Smith's idea of how to write a patriotic song: new lyrics, same old tune. Turtle Fan 20:31, April 7, 2010 (UTC) ::Sometimes the needs of plot override total realism. You'll have to read the story yourself to decide how well HT worked it to seem plausible. ML4E 20:08, April 7, 2010 (UTC) :::If the story's good I should be able to get past it. Turtle Fan 20:31, April 7, 2010 (UTC) :Henri was logically tied to the POD. Can't speak for this yet. TR 15:12, April 6, 2010 (UTC)